Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer

Applies to: Microsoft Antigen

The Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer collects settings and values from the registry, Active Directory® directory service (AD), metabase, and Performance Monitor. The settings are compared against a set of Best Practice rules. A report is then generated that provides administrators with recommendations for improving the system.

To download and run Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer, go to Exchange Best Practices Analyzer.

Among the items that the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer checks are whether your Antigen Services have started, settings that are described in General Options, and the following registry settings that are not available as General Options:

InternetTimeout. To prevent time-out problems when scanning messages, try increasing the time specified in the InternetTimeout registry value. Because this is a hidden registry value, you will need to create a new DWORD registry value called InternetTimeout and set the time in milliseconds. If the value is set too low, this may cause the virus scanner to time out too quickly when processing a single item. If the value is set too high, the virus scanner may spend too much time processing a single item. Therefore, a minimum value of 150000 and a maximum value of 660000 is recommended.

RealtimeTimeout. This setting concerns Store scanning rather than Internet scanning. It must be created and set to the same specifications as the InternetTimeout registry key.

For more information about registry values, see Appendix B - Setting registry values in the Microsoft Antigen for Exchange User Guide at the Microsoft Antigen TechNet Library.